Now first and foremost, last.fm is a great tool to let people get to know what music you like listening to. It also enables you to easily find people who have similar musical tastes. It also gathers statistics according to your music and presents you with your own weekly, monthly or yearly music charts. I guess it’s also much more than that, but I’ll let you find it out for yourselves.

Anyway, how does it work? Either you download their own music player or use special software plugins for your favorite music players, like winamp, xmms, audacious (my player of choice on Linux) and many others. Some players have such plugins already built-in and so you’re ready to use them right out of the box. The software sends data about the tracks that you play back to last.fm, which in return uses it to populate your music profile. Easy as pie and you only need to spend a couple of seconds to set it up (in most cases you only need to enter your user name and password in the software).

These are the basics and I recommend that you give last.fm a try. It’s really a fun way to share information about your personal music tastes. I hope you’ll like it as much as I do.

You don’t need to register in order to see people’s profiles so if you wish to check-out my music profile, simply click here.

OK now as for the blog, in-between exams I managed to make some technical changes here. First and foremost, I abandoned my old hosting service and moved everything to a new one, which is (yeah, I’m sure of it already) faster, more stable and has better support than the old one. The next thing is that I’ve updated both the blog and the forum software. You’ll probably won’t notice anything new thanks to the blog update, but I can’t say the same about the forum, it changed quite a bit (new layout and all). I hope you’ll like the new look and functionality.

So, is that all? Nope. There’s one more change that I’ve made, probably the most substantial of them all. As planned before, I’ve made a second blog for all my posts that aren’t directly related to audio (which is the main focus of this here blog). The address to the second blog is: wojtek.younghifi.com. Expect mostly personal stuff there, so if you’re interested in what’s going on in my life aside from all the audio and music stuff, then that’s the place to go. I’ll probably put up a link to it somewhere here on the homepage, but I haven’t decided where yet, but rest assured that it’ll be quite visible.

I know that there have been such non-audio related posts before here and for now on I’ll leave them here, but I’ll probably move them to the second blog in the future in order to keep the integrity intact.

I guess that’s all for now. Stay tuned for the continuation of the turntable posts series and expect some more posts about vinyl records. This time with hands-on photos!

UPDATE (4th April 2008):

I’ve brought down the other blog after all, so the above mentioned link has been made redundant. I’ll stick to posting non-audio stuff on this blog too.

So what the hell was I doing? Well, for starters I finally got a turntable here in Warsaw, so I’m back on the old vinyl collecting band wagon (yay!). One can also say that I did a lot of audio research, for instance I’ve found out a great recipe for an inexpensive, but very effective vinyl record cleaning fluid. Also, the turntable that I bought had an old cartridge on it so I bought a new one and replaced it (for the first time on my own). I’ve also had to re-adjust the table, so now I’m on the fresh with how it should be done (and not just recalling it how I did it several months ago back home). This is just a taste of the material that I’ll be showcasing here on the blog real soon.

So, tomorrow I’ll be leaving Warsaw for Easter and I plan to be back here on Wednesday. The thing is that I’m not going straight home to Lebork, but to Wrzesnia, a little town in central-western Poland (the so called “Greater Poland” region), because I’ll be spending the holiday at my grandparents’ place this year. That’s why don’t expect any input from me till next week.

In other news, it would sure be great to own a digital camera… I’ve skimmed through all the posts that I wrote here and they surely look bleak without photos… (well one of the Vinyl Collecting 101 posts has some, but they didn’t come from me). I don’t want anything fancy, just something with which I could do some snapshots of my HiFi gear, records and anything which I’d deem useful to show you guys. Problem is that I don’t know much about digital cameras, so I’m open for tips and recommendations regarding this matter.

Well, I still have some packing to do, my train leaves at 10 a.m. so I can’t stay up late either. Happy Easter to all of you!

PS: The title for today’s post comes from a Steppenwolf song :)

As for recent blog-related stuff, I’ve updated the blog software to the newest version, so it should run a bit more smoother now. I’ve also added the “Guides” page, where you can find direct links to all the guide posts that I wrote. You can also think of it as a “featured posts” page.

The recently established forum is slowly becoming more popular (at the time of writing, it’s 6 members strong out of which 3 members are most active). I wonder when will it hit the 10 member milestone…

I promise I’ll get back to some writing right after the examination session.

Furthermore, I’ve decided to slightly divide my blog. As you probably know, I sometimes also post strictly personal posts, sometimes not even related to audio (just like this one here) and I’m not too comfortable with that, because I want this blog to be only about my audio experiences and not all my personal experiences…

That’s why I decided that when I’ll have some more free time on my hands, I’m going to put up a personal blog next to this one. I dunno if I’ll be also using the Wordpress platform for that purpose, but the main idea is to have a place where I can post about stuff completely unrelated to audio, so to not clutter up the content you may find here.

There’s also an idea of starting a “Young HiFi” forum, a discussion board where people who are new to the whole HiFi biz or any other audio hobby have some questions. I’ve noticed that most popular audio forums out there don’t have a “newbie corner” and sometimes the new guy gets ignored or laughed at just because he’s not one of the “elite”…

That’s it for now, tell me what you think about the forum idea, because maybe I’m wrong and such a place isn’t even needed in the big WWW :). I’ll keep you posted when something comes up…

I promised that I’ll write a few words about my new speakers so here it goes:

The JBL L-100T’s hooked up with the Sansui 9090DB sound great, especially if you’re into rock and other genres that feed on raw power and dynamics. But that doesn’t mean that they’re your straight and simple, off the block “ALL-BASS/NO-CLASS” heavy loudspeakers that techno music enthusiasts praise so much these days. The high and midrange are also top-notch, especially the titanium tweeter (that’s what the T stands for in the name). They also seem to have a lot of detail in them. I say that they “seem” to have it, because as for the sound resolution and detail, I can only estimate as of now, because my only source of sound is my computer’s soundcard (an old SoundBlaster Live! Platinum), connected with a not-so-expensive 10 meter long cable… and this really can’t qualify as a quality music source, at least not in my opinion. So I decided that until I get my hands on a decent CD player or turntable hooked up with the system, I’ll leave my review as it is now and come back to it later. I simply feel that my speaker-receiver combo gives as much as it can, but it still can’t spread out it’s wings, because of the source.

On a side note: Actually, some people (especially Hi-Fi newcomers) make the mistake of putting most of their money in the amplifier and speaker sections of their system and leave the rest of the money pile for the source-devices. It kinda should be the other way around, because even the greatest loudspeakers and amps will sound like crap if they’re fed with sound coming from a crappy source. So my word of advice is: the source device should be at least on par with the other components of your Hi-Fi system, quality wise.

Another advice: If you plan to use your SoundBlaster Live! or Audigy series soundcard as a music source and connect it to your amplifier, use the rear-speaker channel output, because it’s of higher quality than the front-speaker one. I know it sounds weird, but the signal really has much less noise in it. If I remember right, it all goes down to the cards having a separate DAC for the front and rear speaker outputs, and Creative (the makers of the SB cards) paired a higher quality one with the rear output. If you don’t believe me, try for yourself. The difference is quite perceivable and you don’t need any high class equipment to hear it.

As for the other part of this post’s title, I’ve got a slight spending dilemma on my hands. I can’t decide on what should I save up money for now. I’ve got 2 ideas: a CD player or photo camera. The CD player would go as the new main source of music in my system, as mentioned above. The photo camera would mostly be for the benefit of the blog, because I (and probably you too) seriously think that my website is really in need of some photos, especially my guide posts. I’ve often written that this lack of “visual attachments” really starts to limit me and the post content’s quality in general.

Luckily, one of my roommates also had a similar problem. He started thinking about either investing in a camera or in new speakers for his computer. You could say that I slightly “poked him” in the right direction, by saying that now he already has a pair of speakers, but he doesn’t have anything to take photos with, so he decided for the camera. He spent a few days on the net and reading photography magazines, while being on the hunt for a good camera that would be available within his budget. He settled on a Samsung (I don’t know the model) and ordered it from the net (ironically enough, the seller is located in my home town). My plan is that when he gets it, I’ll try it out and then if I’ll like it, I’ll buy the same model. I really don’t want to start learning loads of stuff about photography as I’ve learned about audio stuff through trial and error and internet researching methods. I simply want something not too costly ($200 max.) that will make good photos which I can share with other people (like you for example, my faithful readers).

That’s all for now. From the blog’s stats I see that there are more and more readers subscribing to the blog’s RSS feed, which is a good thing, as now I know that there are some folks out there who probably think that my site has some potential and is worthy of coming back to, which really is a high praise for me personally. As for the blog’s top content, my vinyl collecting guides take the top 4 places with almost no competition, so I guess that I’ll finally have to start thinking about a new guide series… Goodnight y’all .

This week I finally got a pair of loudspeakers for my receiver. I’ve also done some cable huntin’ in Warsaw. Thought it would be easy in such a big city. I never thought that I’d start to despise the city street planning afterwards…

Let’s start with the speakers. In my previous post, I mentioned that I bought them on an internet auction just after Christmas. Well, the seller told me last Tuesday that he’d send them on the next day with UPS. I thought that it was fairly possible that the package would be delivered before Sunday, but in order to know that for sure, I’d need the tracking number of the package (or to be precise: packages, cause the speakers are quite big and they wouldn’t fit in one single package). One quick e-mail to the seller and I have the number.

On Friday, I went to UPS’s homepage for operations in Poland, typed-in the number and the reaction here should be like: “Voila!”, but instead was more like “Umm …. m’kay … Who? What? Where?”. I never thought that such an esteemed courier and mail company such as UPS would have such a shitty tracking interface for their customers and I don’t mean the layout of the page. After typing in the tracking number I was presented with a small table which included these columns: date and time of given event, place, description of event. What about the content of this table ? I could only gather that my package was picked-up on Thursday, sent to some place vaguely coded “STA” (I know the seller lives near Szczecin, a city in the far north-western side of Poland and by looking at a map I couldn’t think of any place near there which could have a shortcut of “STA”). Then, after a few hours, my package was still in “STA”, but now the decription said that it was: “Loaded on LH “. Question is: what’s LH ? At this point I really didn’t know what was going on and started looking for help on the website. I mean, they should at least have some legend for their tracking system or something, right? Well, after looking through every FAQ and page marked with “help” or “support” or “customer”, it seems that they don’t. How the hell should an online tracking system be useful to a customer if you’d have to be at least a UPS employee to understand it? I really can’t comprehend the logic behind this feature. Anyway, on Saturday I checked again and there was a new event. This time, the loudspeakers arrived late at night in “WAW” (this time I guessed right that WAW stands for Warsaw, as the Polish name of the city is: Warszawa and people often tend to say “Wawa” as a popular shortcut from the full version) and were being “Loaded on HUB 05″. Again, I don’t know that exactly does “HUB 05″ mean, but at least I’m fairly confident that they arrived in my city. Then I started wondering when will the packages reach their final destination (i.e. my address). I decided to call the UPS hotline and after 4 tries (I only have a cellphone and it seems that the operator rejected the hotline number at first. Weird.), a woman with a nice voice answered. She told me that the delivery will be made on Tuesday. OK, no prob, seems only fare that the delivery guys have a day off on Monday, it being the 1st of January and all.

On Monday, it came to me that even if the speakers will arrive tomorrow, I don’t have any cables with which to connect them to the receiver! I’d also be needing some kind of music source and as my computer’s the only one here at Warsaw (for now), I’d also be needing an IC (InterConnect) cable to connect it too. I’m not from Warsaw, but I was aware that there are some audio-video stores around here, so I started googling for some which also provide a variety of cables. I’ve found one such store which was located on the same street as the subway exit, to which I commute daily in order to get to my college. I jotted down the address of the store and decided to go there on the next day, after classes.

On Tuesday, the courier called my cell while I had a break between classes. He wanted to set a time for the delivery to take place. I told him that I’ll be at home after 3 pm and he replied that if he wouldn’t make it by then, he’d arrive at about 6 pm. After classes, I made my way to the street on which the audio store was located. It was at Warynska Street 10. I see around the corner that I’m standing next to bulding no. 3 and that the next along the road is no. 4, so I go that way. By arriving at no. 9, the next structure was already under a new street name. Figuring that no. 10 would be on the other side of the street, I crossed it, but found no. 42. Went back to where I came from on this side and went further, till I found no. 11. Passing that building, I find that the next building is also under a different street name. “What gives?”, I thought to myself. Too bad that I forgot to take my trusty city map. I started asking passers-by about it, but they didn’t know also. I started to search around in-between the small alleys near no. 11, but to no avail. Fortunately, I found a kiosk and there, a young guy behind the counter told me that it was further down the road after the big street-crossing. Thanks to these directions I’ve finally managed to find the store. Went in, asked about speaker cables, bought 2.5 meters of a cable called “Monitor Atmos Air 309 Cu”. I’ve read about it in a magazine some time ago and it’s presumably a good OFC (Oxygen Free Copper) cable made by a German company called in-akustik and it also happened to be one of the cheapest in that particular shop (it has a price of about 9 bucks per meter). I’ve also asked about a 3.5” jack (also called a “small jack”; the small cable plug that you find in computer soundcards and portable music devices) to 2x RCA (also called “cinch” cables; the cable plugs that you find on audio components) IC, but unfortunately they didn’t have anything with a 3.5” jack…

Later that day, the UPS guy came (just after 3pm). He brought in 2 big packages and I was feeling like it was Christmas again. The unpacking of both packages took me almost an hour, because the loudspeakers were packed very securely (they were wrapped in 3 layers of packing foil and 2 layers of cardboard and that all was surrounded by loads of thick cotton). Thanks to that, no harm occured to them during delivery.

After unpacking (5 pm), I decided to go to the local mall in search of an IC. They didn’t have one, so I just bought some food supplies, which turned out not to be such a good idea at this particular time, because the lines to the cash registers were so long that I spent an hour standing in them. Near the exit, I’ve spotted a small electical appliances shop. They had the IC that I was looking for, but it was only 5 meters long and I needed at least 8 meters of cable in order to lay it around my room (the computer and receiver stand next to opposite walls). When I got home, I googled around once again and I’ve found a cable store in Warsaw that had such interconnects in stock.

On Wednesday, I decided to go to the shop, which I found on the net the day before. Classes end at half past 3 pm at that day, so it was already getting dark. Went to the subway, comuted to a station nearest to the shop’s street and started searching for it, this time with the city map. It was a long trek, took me over an hour to get to the street. It was pretty far of the subway line and I didn’t want to take the risk of taking a bus (I don’t trust buses very much, especially ones that drive through bus lines that I don’t know). The shop’s address was Korotynska Street 23, room 41. I found myself near building no. 16, so I continued walking along the road. I finally came to no. 22, but the next one was no. 24. “What happened to 23?”, I thought. I looked on the other side of the street, but there was a big park there. Just when I wanted to go and search in-between the apartment buildings, a man passed me. I quickly asked him if he knew where no. 23 was. He replied that it was on the other side and the other end of Korotynska Street. I thanked him for the directions, but boy was I mad. Can’t they just tag the house numbers in a more logical order here in Warsaw? Why do they make the street address numbering scheme look like a jigsaw puzzle? Anyway, after a long walk I found building 23. It was a 2 story high barrack-like steel building (looked like it was built back in the socialistic days). I asked a guy who had a TV repair shop located in the building where could I find the cable store. He directed me to a staircase around the corner. Went there and upon entrance, the janitor asked me what was I looking for. She directed me to room 41. I was very happy while finally reaching my destination and just before 5 pm (the store closes at that time). The store consisted of 3 rooms, the one with the exit door being the main sales room with some packed cables hanging around the walls, a neat-dressed guy behind a desk and a computer and some filing cabinets behind him. The 2 other rooms were on the left and right of the main room and there were tons of cardboard boxes in them, presumably packed with audio-video cables. They had the cable I was looking for (10 meters long), but it cost $15 and I didn’t have such an amount of cash by me. Unfortunately, they didn’t take cards, so I asked where’s the nearest ATM. They pointed me to a gas station, near a street crossing halfway of Korotynska Street. Luckily, they also said that they’d be working over-time that day, so the store will be open for another hour. I went back to the crossing, found the gas station, but no ATM was there. I noticed there was a bank on the other side of the road. That was probably what the cable salesman ment. I found that there were 3 banks against each other, taking up the ground floor of a building and one of them was the bank in which I had my personal account. Turned out that the ATM there was broken, so I went to one of the other banks to use one of their ATMs. Took out $20, payed about $2 commision in the process for withdrawing money from a competitor’s machine and off I went back to the shop. Went in, payed the man and off I went. Mission completed! It was already 6 pm and I was really exhausted from all that walking around, so I decided to take a bus the the subway station. I arrived at my district at 7 pm, was extremely hungry, because last time I ate was over 10 hours before so instead of going home and making some dinner-supper combination, I went to a local pizza parlor. When I got home, I unpacked the newly acquired cable, layed it around the room and connected to the receiver. Next, I took my swiss army knife, cut the speaker cable in half and cut off the cable isolation on both ends. While hooking up the first speaker, 2 things occured. One was that the cable was a bit too short. The other was that it was too thick and I couldn’t fit it in the receiver’s speaker cable terminals. Tough luck. It became even tougher later, because I suffered from a terrible and sudden tooth-acke during the night.

Thursday, “another day, another cable”, I said to myself. Thanks to the tooth-acke, I fell asleep at 6 am, only to wake up at 10 to get to classes. Went back to the audio store on Warynska St. after classes. Bought 4 meters of the slightly cheaper Monitor Atmos Air 195 Cu cable (it’s got a smaller diameter). Comuted back home, ate some dumplings for dinner (Polish “pierogi” are the best), went to the dentist, came back at 6 pm and fell quickly asleep.

Friday, woke up at 8 am, made my bed and immediatelly started to get it on with the speaker cable. Again, cut the cable in half and cut of the isolation on the ends. I’ve cut my fingers 3 times in the process, but this finally worked and I got my speakers hooked-up. YAY!

I didn’t have enough time to thoroughly listen to my new speaker-receiver combination, so I still can’t tell you my first impressions in detail… One thing for sure is that now the gates to buying a turntable and CD player are open, so I may start collecting CDs and vinyl records again here in Warsaw!

Phew, this turned out to be a big post. At least now you know how demanding and tiresome this hobby can be. I never thought that I’d have such a hard time with such a trivial thing as cables here in the capitol of Poland … or maybe it’s just that I’m new here. Wonder if anybody will even read this post to the end…

Christmas was nice, seeing my parents and most of the family and all. Everybody enjoyed their presents (including me of course) and we had a very good time together. I also met up with my friend Daniel (I’ve mentioned him in my previous post).

One could say that throughout my presence in Lebork, I’ve had my hands full. I won’t get into details, cause it was mostly family related. I haven’t even touched my turntable! I also promised myself before to take some photos that would be a good addition for my previous posts, but nope, didn’t have the time to do that either…

I can already say that the year 2007 will bring me some good sound, because one thing that turned up while I was back at my home is that I found a pair of good loudspeakers (JBL L-100T) on an internet auction and won them for a good price. I’ve bought a receiver in October, a Sansui 9090DB, and since that time I was mainly using it as an amplifier for my headphones (Sennheiser HD-280 Pro) while getting most of my music from my computer’s soundcard. I haven’t searched for a CD player or a turntable, because I decided that having some speakers was the first priority before anything else and now the time has finally come. They will most probably be delivered to me tomorrow. I’m pretty happy about the fact, because I’ve been hunting for some good and renowned speakers for quite some time now (over a year at least). I’ll let you know more about my first impressions when they get here and when I’ll have a chance to hook them up to the receiver (gotta go and buy some speaker cables too).

As for the blog, I’ve slightly updated the “Vinyl records: Collecting 101 – part 2″ post with some info about vinyl records having drillholes and cut-corners (I’d forgotten about it while I was writing it). More details about that in said post.

I’d also like to say a few things to those people who have posted links directing to my blog on some websites. I appreciate it very much, but I really don’t like it when somebody describes my site as a “vinyl blog”. OK, I know that I’ve written a big deal of information about vinyl records, but I really have no intention of writing ONLY or even OFTEN about vinyl. The blog’s title is “Young HiFi” and not “Young Vinyl”. I have posts about turntables, laserdiscs, the computer demoscene, quadrophonics and other stuff all written up already in my notepad, just waiting to be expanded and published here online. To put things in a nutshell, I really appreciate it that people put links to my blog in the world wide web, but please read the “About” page prior of doing so and if you really find it satisfactionary to just tell of my recent vinyl articles than just point the link at the first part of the Vinyl Records: Collecting 101 series. Why? Because if I won’t be writing anything about vinyl for the next couple of months, then how good is a description of my blog , saying that it’s all and only about vinyl, when it’s not true?

That’s all for today (or rather “for tonight”). Time to get some well earned sleep…

As a start, I’m sorry for being late with my posts again, I had 2 tests at college this week (hopefully they went well) and thanks to that I was too occupied to write anything new. In most cases, the 3-4 first days of the week are the most tiresome for me and when I’m tired it’s hard for me to write add something new to the blog. That’s why I’m not surprised when I see that most of my posting is done from Thursday till Sunday, so in the future you can expect me to be most active here during those days.

I’ve spent half of my day today hanging out with my girlfriend and the other half by cleaning up my room and packing my bag, because I’m going back to my hometown for Christmas. I’m really looking forward to it this year, because most of my family and relatives from my father’s side will be there and also a dear friend of mine is coming from Belgium to Lebork in order to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve with his family here (normally he’s in Poland only for a few weeks per year, mostly during the summer holidays).

I’ll be staying in Lebork till Thursday (I think) and I don’t know if I’ll be able to post anything on the blog during that time. I suppose that my friends and family, which I’ve last seen 3 months ago, will be tearing me apart with questions about my girlfriend, how I’m managing to live on my own in Warsaw, etc. and that can get pretty tiresome, let alone time consuming. But I can’t blame them, families & friends always get together during Christmas, don’t they ?

I’d also like to thank Dan and Caleb for being brave enough to be the first people to post comments here. I think that getting some input from you guys is a better proof for me that there are some people out there reading & enjoying my blog than the dull figures that I observe on the blog’s visitor statistics.

That’s all for today. Merry Christmas everyone, may all your wishes come true!

As to the updates:
1. Finally wrote the “About” page, which you can read by clicking on the About link, which is located on the top of the right blog panel, under the “Pages” category.

2. Deleted the Links from the main page and put them all into a link page called “Links”, found also under the “Pages” category on the right blog panel.

I’ve decided that this is better than the former way, because it allows me more control of the links order and doesn’t limit me at describing the links (I simply hate it when someone gives you a link to a website and doesn’t say a word on what is that site about).

3. Added a small vertical Google AdSense bar, as you can probably see on the right.

I still haven’t fully decided if I will be having AdSense on the blog, where will it be located or how it will look like.

4. Added my blog to some blog directories (for instance: Technorati) in order to make my and your life easier :)

Also, as a nod to the “discipline punching” I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve decided to make a promise to the readers: from now on I’ll keep posting on a “1 post per 3 days” MINIMUM basis. It needs to be done in order for this site to have any useful content in the near future and the funny thing is that almost daily I get new ideas as to what to write about, but at the end of the day end up at not even typing the blog’s address in my web browser.

So be prepared for some serious posting in the upcoming days and in the future (hopefully not ONLY the NEAR future).